drift: From memory, custom slow ugly CPU, otherwise similar to MSX (sprite chip and AY 3 chans+noise, 16-color definable chars). This was the very first computer I bought with my own money :P Guess it works as invitro but let's see what you can do demowise next! :)

Thumb for TI-99/4a. We'll have to try to show this one at Demosplash next year. As for the hardware, TMS9900 was a nice 16 bit CPU with some interesting features (it was basically a single-chip TI 990 minicomputer), the problem with the 99/4a is that they stuck it on an 8 bit bus, and a lot of software for it was written in an interpreted language called "GPL" (no relation to the free software license), the interpreter for which was stored in slow serial ROMs. This included the BASIC interpreter, meaning that any BASIC code was interpreted twice. Apparently if you write in straight assembly it's a reasonably fast machine.